Play, narrative and the creation of religion: Extending the theoretical base of ‘invented religions’

Abstract

What may be termed ‘invented religions’, self-consciously fictive movements that emerge from alternative subcultures in the West from the 1950s to the present include Discordianism, the Church of all Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, Jediism and Matrixism. This study employs the model of origin and development of religion from Bellah [Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press], focusing particularly on the centrality of play, to establish three crucial propositions. The first of these is that play, narrative and experiences of an order other than the quotidian are central to the emergence and maintenance of religion. The second is that different types of social organisation and political organisations will foster different types of religion. Bellah argues that these are related to the four modes of human developmental psychology, characterised as unitive, enactive, symbolic and conceptual. This claim is significant, because it links recent cognitive models of the origin and development of religion to older social constructionist theories. Third, it is argued that invented religions are important because they render transparent the process of the origin and formation of religions from play and narrative. It is concluded that invented religions are a particular cultural form of the human impulse to religion, appropriate to the twenty-first century West.